Re: [PATCH] trim memory not covered by WB MTRRs

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Jesse Barnes <jbarnes@virtuousgeek.org> writes:

> On Tuesday, June 12, 2007 6:11:21 Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>> Jesse Barnes <jesse.barnes@intel.com> writes:
>> > On some machines, buggy BIOSes don't properly setup WB MTRRs to
>> > cover all available RAM, meaning the last few megs (or even gigs)
>> > of memory will be marked uncached.  Since Linux tends to allocate
>> > from high memory addresses first, this causes the machine to be
>> > unusably slow as soon as the kernel starts really using memory
>> > (i.e. right around init time).
>> >
>> > This patch works around the problem by scanning the MTRRs at
>> > boot and figuring out whether the current end_pfn value (setup
>> > by early e820 code) goes beyond the highest WB MTRR range, and
>> > if so, trimming it to match.  A fairly obnoxious KERN_WARNING
>> > is printed too, letting the user know that not all of their
>> > memory is available due to a likely BIOS bug.
>>
>> A quick update.  This patch is horribly incorrect on a socket F
>> opteron/Athlon 64 with memory above 4GB.
>>
>> In particular those cpus are capable of mapping all of memory
>> above 4GB as write back without using a single MTRR.
>>
>> So examining MTRRs is insufficient.
>
> Hm, yuck.  What do you suggest?  Should we only run this check when Intel 
> chips are present?  Checking only the bottom 4G isn't sufficient since we've 
> seen platforms that have issues above that range...

My gut feel says that we need to call a function that is potentially cpu specific,
older AMD cpus and Intel cpus can just use the generic mtrr code.

I would also suggest we build a list of ranges of write-back memory.  Which
until we handle overlapping MTRRs in the generic MTRR case is just the write-back
MTRRs.

Then we get the data in a linux specific form we can check the linux specific
data structure against the e820 map.

I don't think that is going to much harder and it allows for creative cpu
designers.

Although this suggests that we want to worry about all memory holes as
well.  Because I have seen at least one system which failed to cover
the lower 4G with MTRRs.  While everything above 4G was fine.

Eric

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